Eighteen-week plan starting in September, currently 40km a week with my phone in an armband and a $40 band I don't trust for pace. Budget $250-400 and I'd rather spend it on shoes if the watch isn't doing real work. The specific thing I keep failing at is running to pace on long runs — I go out too fast and blow up around 25km. Is that a watch problem or a discipline problem?
Spend it on shoes. Genuinely. Two pairs in rotation is worth more over eighteen weeks than any watch feature, and your $40 band plus a pace card folded in your pocket will get you round. I did my first two marathons exactly like that.
Do it for three long runs. If you still can't hold pace, buy the watch and you'll know exactly which feature you're buying and why.
The pace card is such an obvious cheap experiment to run before spending anything.
It's a discipline problem that a watch makes much easier to solve. The feature you want isn't GPS accuracy, it's a configurable alert that buzzes when you drift outside a pace band, plus a data screen you can read at 30km with sweat in your eyes. Both are on essentially every dedicated running watch and on almost none of the cheap bands. Your phone can do it via an app talking to headphones, which works and is fiddly enough that you'll stop.
Pace alerts fixed precisely this for me. The first 10k of a long run is where the whole thing is lost, and you cannot feel the difference between 5:20 and 5:05 in the first kilometre. Nobody can.
A buzz when I drift out of the band is exactly the thing I need. I don't look at the phone until it's already too late.
Battery in GPS mode is the spec to check for race day, not the smartwatch-mode headline number. Anything current handles a four or five hour marathon comfortably, but if you're also running music and a paired sensor, check the figure with all of that switched on.
Whatever you get, wear it for three long runs before race day and configure the screens then. Fiddling with a new device in the start pen is a classic way to spend the first 5k staring at your own wrist.
@switchback_sid · 17h ago
Numbers from my block last year: phone GPS and watch GPS agreed within about 1% on open roads and diverged badly on a tree-lined river path — I had a 400m gap over a 21km run. If your long runs are in woods, that's the argument for a dedicated multi-band unit, and it's also the argument for learning to run by effort rather than by whatever number you're looking at.
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